Definition
A writ of medieval English law that lay against a servant who unlawfully abandoned or departed from his master's service in violation of the labor legislation enacted in the wake of the Black Death. The full form of the writ's name — ordinatione contra servientes — means, roughly, "by the ordinance against servants." It provided a legal mechanism by which a master could compel a departed servant to return, or otherwise seek redress for the breach of obligatory service.
The statutory foundation was the Statute of Laborers, 23 & 24 Edw. III (1349–1350), which sought to fix wages and restrict the movement of laborers and servants at a time when labor scarcity following the plague had disrupted the traditional order of service. The writ issued out of the Register of Original Writs and was a direct instrument of enforcement of that statutory regime.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in sources dealing with the medieval and early modern English writ system. Researchers encountering it should understand several navigational points.
First, the writ is historically specific: it has no modern counterpart and no living application. Its relevance is confined to legal history research, studies of the Statute of Laborers and its enforcement apparatus, and scholarship on villeinage, serfdom, and the conditions of labor in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England.
Second, the form of the name varies across historical sources. Researchers may encounter abbreviations, partial citations, or transliterated variants in Latin registers and Year Books. The standard reference point for locating the writ's formal text is the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Register of Original Writs), which Rapalje & Lawrence cite at folio 189. Any researcher tracing the writ itself should consult that register rather than relying on secondary dictionary treatments.
Third, the writ sits at the intersection of several areas of the Law Mind corpus: labor regulation, the law of master and servant, the development of the original writ system, and the legislative history of the Edwardian statutes. It connects importantly to the broader history of compulsory service law, which in English legal development runs from the Statute of Laborers through the later law of apprenticeships and ultimately into the modern law of employment.
Fourth, the Statute of 23 & 24 Edw. III is part of a cluster of mid-fourteenth century labor statutes — including the earlier Ordinance of Laborers (1349) issued by royal proclamation before formal parliamentary enactment — and researchers should be alert to the distinction between the Ordinance and the Statute when tracing citations in historical sources. Some sources cite the Ordinance; others the Statute; and the writ's name itself references the ordinance rather than the statute proper, which may cause confusion in tracking its precise legal foundation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence provide the only direct treatment in the available source material, and their entry is spare: they identify the writ as lying against a servant for leaving his master contrary to the ordinance of 23 & 24 Edw. III, and they supply the Register of Original Writs citation. This is sufficient for identification but provides nothing about the writ's procedure, its practical use, or the scope of the statutory scheme it enforced.
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry appears immediately adjacent to the maxim Ordine placitandi servato, servatur et jus (Co. Litt. 303a) — "The order of pleading being preserved, right is preserved" — which is unrelated in substance but proximate in the alphabetical arrangement, reflecting the compressed format of that dictionary. Researchers should not read any doctrinal connection between these adjacent entries.
No other source dictionary in the available material covers this term. The silence of other historical dictionaries is not surprising: terms tied to obsolete writs and specific medieval statutes were inconsistently treated across nineteenth-century legal dictionaries, with coverage depending heavily on editorial choices about the scope of historical legal vocabulary.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ was purely an English legal instrument with no American counterpart. The American legal system did not inherit the Statute of Laborers or its enforcement writs. Researchers working in American legal history will not encounter this writ in domestic sources.